written in 1942, on the Symposium. One bibliographic essay covering such scholarship notes in particular the "anachronistic" nature of the idea that Greek women were confined to "oriental seclusion," and cites the publication of monographs and essay collections on the subject of women's participation in litigation and public life (Katz 540).
Women's social identities were anchored by their relationship to fathers, husbands, uncles, who functioned as their guardians, or kyrios, and had a good deal of authority over them. The fact that, in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis Agamemnon is able to summon his wife Clytemnestra and their daughter Iphigenia to him as he prepares to leave for war--only to sacrifice Iphigenia so that the gods will give the Achaean ships the wind they need to sail off to Troy--is instructive in that regard. However, readers of Aeschylus' Orestia trilogy know t
...